


Evergreen

by Legendaerie



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Botany, Christmas, Gen, Offscreen character death, Science Saves Christmas, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 08:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8971870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legendaerie/pseuds/Legendaerie
Summary: Not liking Christmas doesn't mean you can't have a little bit of holiday spirit, and Jean cares too much about plants to let some stranger's memorial tree wither away.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sh_wright890](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sh_wright890/gifts).



> the most embarrassing thing about this is the fact that i really, really didn't have to look up much stuff at all to be (moderately) factually accurate. fucking ten years of 4H and what does it help me with? pinch hitting fanfiction.
> 
> anyway, enjoy! happy christmas and merry holidays, everyone!

Working at a plant nursery has probably never been anyone’s dream job. Even for someone who is extremely passionate about plants, like Jean himself, it’s not always a fun job. Mostly because he can tell almost immediately which people are going to come back in three weeks with their dead plant and demand a refund. (The customer isn’t always right, but they’re almost certainly self-righteous.) A less drastic version of watching someone leave the pet store with their new fish, shaking the bag the whole time.

This is his on paper, official version for avoiding the front, with all the houseplants like the spider plants Hitch is totally pinching spiderlets off of and reselling. His excuse for why he leaves the checkout to more cheerful, more capable members of the nursery, and why he spends his time in the monitoring all the little saplings is that Jean hates people and is more inclined to choke someone with the remains of their withered english ivy rather than refund them.

Honestly though? Jean loves trees. Tending to little, fragile things that could outlive him by a hundred years if tended right gives him a sense of… perspective, maybe. A feeling of some kind, a genuine human emotion. Pride, maybe, or a delighted sense of his own mortality. Given time and the proper rotting bits of dead animals, a good oak tree will outlive him by as much as a couple centuries.

He may not look the part of hobby botanist, with a half sleeve of tattoos currently covered by his work coat, but Jean knows his shit. Which is why he stays in the back, thank you, away from all the black thumbs and the dime a dozen houseplants, and works with the valuable merchandise. Few people actually come back here, since most of the time the orders are from landscaping companies, and he’ll just supervise the truck that’ll pick up the order at the end of the day.

Except for Christmas. That's when his sapling sanctuary is invaded by the public, and Jean has to try on happy expression that never seem to fit right, pinching like a shoe in the wrong size.

It’s a little hard, sometimes, cutting down several year old trees to sell as decoration. Especially when he never grew up really celebrating Christmas, and doesn’t have the nostalgia attached to it. But he gets a little extra cash, working out here in the cold and the snow, so Jean does it. And he keeps his frowns hidden until some cliche white family is driving off with a nine year old Douglas fir in the bed of their truck and he can sulk in peace.

So if he happens to still be wearing said frown when someone taps him on the shoulder four minutes before his shift ends, it’s not totally his fault.

“Yeah?” he’s already asking, turning to meet a pair of startled eyes in a man’s face. “Uh, can I help you?” Jean amends, pasting on a weak smile.

“Uh, yeah. I’m looking for balls?”

Jean pauses. Tilts his head back just a little, trying to stare down his nose at someone who is unfortunately just a tiny bit taller than him. “Balls,” he repeats, in the most professional, serious, not-at-all-giggling-internally-like-a-frat-boy tone he can summon.

“Yeah, you know,” and the guy does a mirrored gesture with his hands in the air a couple times. It takes Jean a couple seconds before it clicks.

“Oh. You mean the replantable trees.”

“Yes. Sorry, I--” the guys laughs, rubbing the back of his neck with a mittened hand. “Should been more clear.”

Jean doesn’t comment on that, as his paycheck is based on the premise _‘if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all’_ and leads the customer down through lanes of trees. The packed snow under his boots is muffled by the spread of pine needles, their crisp and pungent scent muddied by days and days of relentless foot traffic. Twisting his shoulders to avoid clawing spruce branches is a reflex, side stepping a sprinting child is an instinct, and still having the strength to put a smile in his voice is a skill forged in the fires of retail.

“Do you know where you’re going to be planting this tree?” Jean asks, nudging aside a particularly ambitious branch. As he lets it go, it comes close to hitting the customer in the face.

The guy doesn't seem to notice. “Uh. Not specifically? Probably in my backyard though. We’ve got a big place.”

“Where?”

“Northwest, little under an hour. My family used to raise dairy cows.”

“Good soil, then.” Jean says, holding back an essay on soil ph and other botanical specifics along with the next branch, until his companion is clear of its swing. “So you should be fine with your pick of trees. Maybe avoid some of the baby spruces, they can get a little stressed from being outside, then inside, then back outside again.”

“Um--” the guy stops dead, fumbling his phone out of his pocket. Jean exhales hard, breath billowing from his nose like smoke from a dragon’s snout, arm still pulling back the branch. And then it dawns on him; he’s taking fucking _notes_.

Letting go of the branch crosses his mind. So does staying employed. “There’s care sheets up front.” Jean assures him.

“Oh, okay. I’m Marco, by the way.”

“Jean.”

He gestures Marco to pass him and falls into step behind him as they leave the large, planted trees and step into wider, shorter rows of trees in buckets, with their roots wrapped into large burlap covered bags. The selection is a little broader than their cut-your-own trees, with little firs and pines and spruces as well as a couple other more interesting varieties of evergreen less intended for lights and ornaments but none the less good sellers.

Marco, at least, seems entertained, and Jean is content to follow a few steps back as Marco touches each tree at least once with gentle hands, sometimes with a whispered comment that Jean doesn’t care enough to catch. He's seen stranger things than people talking to plants. Hell, he himself has done stranger, like the time he was in college and cut himself while propagating a baby rubber plant, which then seemed to thrive, and then tried feeding it blood and hamburger drippings for a week. The smell of the soil still haunts him sometimes.

It’s only when one of the guy's phrases is repeated, again, louder and with a lilt at the end that Jean realizes it’s directed at him. “Yes?” he asks, and it’s too late in the day to school all of the resignation out of his voice.

“I was curious if you had to work on Christmas as well,” Marco asks, tone almost musical, tender and mild.

“No, we close around 11pm on Christmas Eve and don’t open again until the 27th.”

Marco smiles, all authenticity and dark eyes just catching the sparse overhead lighting, warm like coffee. “I hope you get to spend it with people you love,” he says, which is trite as hell, but Jean presses his lips together and doesn’t rebut him by saying that’s a damn short list.

“You too,” is what he mutters, instead, too late.

Unperturbed, the customer spends several more minutes wandering up and down the aisles. Jean keeps a measured distance by trying to keep the toes of his boots from touching the any of Marco’s four shadows, each fanning out in a different direction like the points of a compass. When he looks up, he catches Hitch’s eye from where she’s following a couple who are in matching coats and holding hands, obviously smitter.

As he watches, she mimes strangling herself with her scarf. Jean forms an imaginary gun with his hand, cocks the thumb, and is just resting the muzzle between his teeth when Marco asks him something again.

“So do you-- oh.”

“Sorry, had something between my teeth,” Jean lies as fast as he can. Which isn’t totally inaccurate, he had one finger between them just then. And boredom, too. Does that count? “What’s up?”

“I think I’m supposed to get a fir tree? But I don’t know if that’s, um, a good kind or. What’s the difference between those and pines.”

“Firs are next row down, at the end.” Trying to be helpful, Jean pulls out a flashlight and selects a branch from the nearest pine. “Pine trees usually have long needles, and some have more than others. Like, this is a white pine, since each little cluster has five needles." He spreads the needles apart with his thumb, letting Marco get a good look. "Red pines and other hard pines have two.  Firs are a bit more like spruces, with short thick needles.”

“Sorry,” says Marco, as Jean leads him past a row of red pines, “this is the first time I’ve ever bought a potted tree for Christmas. Usually my dad would get a cut one or something.”

“Why switch to potted ones now?”

“He died.”

Jean freezes. “...Oh.”

After a beat, Marco steps around him again, inspecting the nearest fir. “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry,” he adds anyway, shoving his hands into his coat pockets and thumbing the flashlight. “I’ve heard the first Christmas is the hardest.”

“Thank you, Jean. Anyway,” Marco presses on, like he’d just mentioned he’d gotten a flat tire last week, “we’re getting a balled tree to plant over his ashes in the spring. So I’m looking for one that-- reminds me of him, I guess.”

Jean feels woefully underprepared for the emotional depth of this conversation, so he just seals his lips shut until Marco finally picks a tree; a nice five or so foot tall Fraser fir that Jean tags at the base with a zip tie and a number.

“I’ll need to get the Bobcat out to lift it. Do you want to take it home yourself, or you want it delivered first thing tomorrow?”

“Oh, I’ll take it home. I bought the truck and some bungee cords.”

“Great.” A little disappointed he won’t get the relief of leaving the nursery while on the clock, Jean pats down his jacket, looking for the keys. “If you head on back to the main office, I’ll meet you up there. Sound good?”

“Sounds great. Thank you so much for your help today, Jean. And merry christmas. Oh, and happy holidays, too.” Marco waves as he heads back up the lane, and Jean catches himself waving back, mind already focused on something else.

 

* * *

 

The encounter sticks with Jean the whole way home, caught in his throat around the reheated pizza he has for dinner, humming in the background as he watches a couple episodes of Bob’s Burgers on TV. It gets under his skin and takes hold, parasitic, until he’s hunting through some of his old horticulture textbooks and scribblings notes on post-its in the margins. At 1am he forces himself to stop, to go to sleep and resume his life but when he wakes up the thought is still there.

“If I’m being haunted by some random cute guy’s dead dad,” Jean mutters to himself in the shower, playing with the healing hole in his earlobe from a college piercing, “I’m gonna get religious just to get rid of the bastard.”

But he brings his notes to work anyway and waits until lunch break to broach the subject, uneasily, to another one of his co-workers.

“So, Marlowe,” he starts, placing himself carefully by the door as he unwraps a honey bun from the break room basket of slightly suspect but free food, “do we keep billing addresses or anything on file?”

“Only if the customer wanted a delivery.”

“Phone number?”

“No.” Marlowe takes another bite of salad and narrows his eyes as he chews. “What’s going on?”

Jean plays with the cellophane as it sticks to his fingers. “Well, this guy who was here last night mentioned that he’s gonna burying his dad’s ashes under a tree, so.”

His co-worker stabs another leaf, no understanding slowly dawning on his face. Jean clears his throat, puts on his best Science Voice, and starts to explain.

“Well, a big chunk of ash isn’t gonna decompose. You gotta mix it with other because it’s got a really high-- hey, I’m a plant guy and you’re a numbers guy, don’t stare at me like that.” Dropping the voice, Jean tries to flick a torn piece of cellophane at Marlowe’s stupid face, but it flutters down to his feet. “What?”

“Just surprised your heart grew two more sizes while I wasn’t looking,” he says.

Jean glares down his nose at Marlowe as the door opens behind him, then closes. “Hey, I can be _nice_ and still dislike Christmas, fuck you very much.”

Hitch elbows Jean in the side as she passes. “What’s up?”

Better to hear it from him than Marlowe. “I’m trying to help some bastard from accidentally killing his dead father’s tree,” Jean volunteers, letting his co-worker go back to his salad.

“What, the guy from last night with the Fraser fir? I’d guess Jean’s _heart_ wasn’t the only thing that grew a couple sizes then.”

Marlowe gags.

Jean snorts and points his lunch at her in an accusatory fashion. “Hey, I’m trying to be considerate. As much as that may surprise you, I can do nice things without wanting sex in exchange.”

“I’m just saying,” Hitch says, pouring hot water into a cup and adding two different tea bags, “Dude was cute. Got the whole boy scout middle part and freckled cheeks going. I can see why you might wanna connect the dots a bit.”

She wiggles her eyebrows.

“You’re a lesbian,” Jean reminds her, and it had been too dark out back to see if Marco had any freckles. “Why are you making facial jokes at me at 11am on a Tuesday?”

“Because he paid with a check and the address is in the notebook in the office,” she says sweetly, sitting down next to Marlowe and pulling out three concentrated energy drinks, setting them on the table beside her tea. “You’re welcome.”

Oh. Yeah. That’s why he works here. Because everyone else at the nursery, whether they’re plant people, numbers people, or just really good with a pair of loppers, is a goddamn Slytherin.

Jean grabs another bun on his way out the door. “I’m going on lunch,” he calls over his shoulder, heading first to the office. Sure enough, there’s the name; Marco Bodt, 1031 Heaven’s Gate Dr. Little shy of an hour north of his work, little over that from his house. It’s doable.

The rest of his shift drags on. Jean smiles, tags trees, cuts them down and helps drag them into the backs of waiting cars, and all the while balances formulas in his head. He’ll need peat moss, and some sulfur for the ph, maybe some of that really old rabbit manure and sand to help with the drainage. The soil’s pretty good up north anyway, it shouldn’t take too much to fix.

As soon as he’s off shift, Jean finds himself looking up how much ash is produced by the average human body, which isn’t something he planned on needing to look up, _ever_ , but damn it, he can’t stop. He doesn’t even do Christmas, but on the ride home he sees someone’s decorated fifteen foot tall spruce on their front lawn and he feels an ache in his chest.

Half of the fertilizers from the nursery are in the back seat of his car, in bags and buckets, and Jean sets up a card table in the garage. Fuck anyone who looks in and wonders if he’s trying to make drugs, he has a bachelor’s in botany and he is going to save Christmas.

 

* * *

 

Okay, so maybe showing up to a stranger’s house with half a five gallon bucket of tan powder that smells like rabbit shit and eggs isn’t the perfect spitting image of a Hallmark christmas special. And maybe he should have, you know, tried to call ahead first. But if Jean perfectly planned through everything he wouldn’t be where he is today and--

And--

All right, that turn of phrase got a little too literal. Whatever. Jean presses his forehead against the hard curve of the nursery truck’s steering wheel, reminds himself that he told his boss he was out on delivery, and resolves to pick up some anti ghost charm from that weird store, The Niche Witch, next time he’s downtown.

The bucket is heavy and makes his gait a little uneven as Jean logs it up a long, weather worn gravel path. It’s a little spooky in the early evening light, with grey clouds hiding what could have otherwise been a lovely sunset, ruptured once or twice with gold. The snow from a few days back has melted and frozen again, leaving dried grass to roll along the picturesque hills like the pelt of some massive, sleeping animal. On one rise sits the house, on the other a long disused barn, and Jean shivers.

He knocks on the door, willfully ignoring the howling voices in the back of his head that screech about what a bad idea this is, and leans against one of the wooden posts on the porch in his best, most confident and charming lean. It creaks, low and ominous like a dog snarling, and Jean jumps up just in time for the door to open.

“Jean?” Marco asks, dresses in a sweatpants and a hoodie with a dog on it that reads _Happy Paw-lidays_. Behind him, a warmly lit but messy kitchen glows, with Christmas music radiating through the static of the radio and complementing the distinct smell of gingerbread.

Hitch was right. He did have freckles. “Uh,” Jean starts, rubbing his shoulder, “so. Kind of a weird thing to ask, but-- you said you were gonna bury your dad’s ashes under the tree, right?”

“Yes?” The little tilt to Marco’s head is cute, and Jean’s dread only increases. Shit, he hopes Hitch wasn’t right about anything else.

“Ashes aren’t super good, uh, for the soil when they’re all in a clump. It can really fuck up a soil’s ph so I, uh. I did a bit of research and I mixed up some fertilizer.” Jean nudges the bucket with his boot. “It doesn’t smell great, but if you mix it with the ash it’ll, uh, really help the tree. And stuff.”

Marco presses his knuckles to his lips, eyes locked on the bucket. “Um,” he says, after a long uneasy moment, “that’s-- really nice of you to bring by, and--”

“It’s free,” Jean cuts in, on a hunch, and watches Marco deflate in the doorway. “Yeah, I know I’m in the uniform and everything--”

“Oh,” and the other hand slides up to Marco’s mouth, then both up to hide his eyes. “Oh, wow.”

“No, it’s fine, dude, I just--” he cuts himself when Marco looks up, eyes bright with tears. “And you’re crying. Shit. I--”

Further words are driven out of him when Marco hugs him. Even when Marco lets go of him, mere seconds later, Jean can’t move.

“Sorry, sorry, I should have asked-- can I invite you in for coffee, or cookies, or something?”

“I’m still on the clock,” Jean stammers at last, or something like it. Shaking himself, Jean tugs the bottom hem of his coat down, just in case. “So, uh. Should probably head out.”

Marco sniffles, rubbing the heel of his hand across his cheeks and giving Jean another smile that makes his throat feel tight. “I’ll be sure to do that. Hang on one second, though,” and he retreats back into the kitchen.

Jean takes a step forward, tugging the bucket along, just to peer inside and watch Marco stand on his toes to grab a little plastic container from the cabinets and start packing it full of white and bronze cookies. He can’t help but feel a little wistful; if his own christmas’ had looked like that, maybe he would have celebrated them after he moved out.

“You have to let me give you this,” Marco insists, coming back to the door and offering the container. “Old family recipe.”

“Sure,” Jean agrees, tucking the container under his arm. “So, uh. I’ll see you around. Good luck with your holidays.”

“Thank you again. I mean it, okay? This is the sweetest thing anyone’s ever-- well,” Marco cuts himself off. “I’ll let you get back to work. Just. Thank you.”

“Yeah,” he says again, a little strangled this time, the surreal feeling of being on the fuzzy edge of genuine human emotion having an allergic reaction with his stubborn apathy. “Happy Christmas, and all that stuff.”

This time, the smile he wears lasts him the whole drive back.


End file.
